Seema Verma, the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), invited the Center for Medicare Advocacy and other advocacy organizations to meet with her on June 25, 2018. The Administrator asked our organizations to provide one to two recommendations for the Requirements of Participation that would reduce burdens on nursing facilities. However, recent actions by CMS have indicated that “burden reduction” may really translate to rolling back nursing home residents’ rights and protections. For instance, CMS placed an 18-month moratorium on the full enforcement of several resident protections, including standards dealing with antipsychotic drugs and baseline care plans.[1] This change also stemmed from CMS’s efforts to reduce provider “burdens.”

In accepting the Administrator’s invitation to meet, our organizations submitted a joint statement advocating that the nursing home Requirements of Participation should not be changed to reduce provider “burdens.” As our organizations expressed in the statement and during our meeting with Administrator Verma, many “issues that providers call burdens are very often resident protections.”